Immigration Blog

Over the years it has become so common for companies to replace Americans with H-1B workers that the practice makes little news now. A few days ago we learned that Disney was H-1B-ing American programmers and it only made the local news in Orlando. That has not been the case at Southern California Edison, where the story got picked up by the Drudge Report.

Immigration lawyers are now in BS reaction mode. The Americans being fired should sue for discrimination or complain to the Department of Labor. Yet immigration lawyers know full well that such actions would be futile for they are the ones who have gone to extreme lengths to ensure that replacing Americans with H-1B workers remains legal. Read more...

The benefits can be as much as several thousand dollars — and perhaps as much as $10,000 over the years for some illegals, particularly parents. It's a pretty specialized offer wrapped in IRS complexities, but one that will probably bring some serious money to income tax preparers working in areas where there are numerous amnesty beneficiaries. Read more...

Once again the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — the folks who are supposed to keep us safe — have shown that they can't distinguish wheat from chaff. A few days ago, the FBI announced that its newest most-wanted suspect is one Liban Haji Mohamed, a Somali-born naturalized citizen who was brought to the United States as a refugee.

ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross will lower the boom on fraudsters and other criminals using the immigrant investor (EB-5) program in tonight's broadcast of "World News Tonight" and later on "Nightline". Read more...

The Senate Democrats and President Obama are very troubled by the decision they may soon have to make. They have two options: (1) Fully fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by passing a House appropriations bill that prohibits Obama's lawless amnesty, or (2) Declare that amnesty for illegal aliens is more important than national security and block the DHS funding bill from becoming law.

The graft-ridden immigrant investor (EB-5) program and New Orleans' sloppy governance were destined to come together, and they have done so, according to investigative reporting just published by Al Jazeera America.

A few years ago the (now-jailed) Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, signed a 30-year exclusive agreement with NobleOutreach NOLA LLC, a USCIS-recognized EB-5 regional center. It was to be the city's sole connection to EB-5 financing, with a cluster of half-million dollar investments from largely Chinese aliens designed to continue the post-Katrina re-building process. Read more...

The New York Times recently published a profile of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos that highlights the Republican quandary about illegal immigration. The author quotes Ramos telling Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus that the party is so fixated on deportation that "the message is anti-immigrant."

Deportations, of course, mainly target illegal immigrants (plus legal immigrants who commit serious crimes). This is a distinction that Ramos chooses not to make. This descriptive failure has strategic consequences that Ramos appreciates. It invokes on behalf of illegal immigrants the emotional, mythical, and personal connotations of our immigrant backgrounds. Read more...

Twenty-seven police chiefs and sheriffs from around the country have raised the surrender flag on illegal immigration and filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting President Obama's executive amnesty for illegal aliens.

Usually the Washington Post, like much of the mainstream media, emphasizes the virtues, if not the heroism, of migrants, legal or illegal. If there are problems they are ignored or downplayed.

But last week the Post ran a comprehensive, fact-filled, two-page expose of how one immigrant family with a middle-class income managed to run up more than $1.3 million in various debts that they cannot possibly repay. The family, from Ghana, had secured visa lottery green cards back in 1997. Read more...

Anyone who doubts we're living in an American Potemkin village where the subject of immigration is concerned should read, and carefully juxtapose, the following three excerpts, two from the president and a more recent one from the Washington Times.

[W]e're going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids.

The perverse outcome of this story of good educational intentions gone wrong in Texas reminds me of the rollicking old Henry Wallace Progressive song about "Charlie on the MTA" that dealt with a similar goof in the Massachusetts Transit Authority's Boston subway system: Read more...

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) recently cited a study published by CIS in June while discussing jobs and immigration. Michelle Ye Hee Lee did a "fact check" of his comments for the Washington Post and gave him three out of four Pinocchios. Her article seems designed to nitpick what Santorum said rather than to judge its truthfulness. According to Lee, Santorum stated the following at the Iowa Freedom Summit: "There are fewer Americans working today who were born in this country than there were in the year 2000." Lee's main point is that Santorum is drawing from our study and that his statement only relates to the 16- to 65-year-old population. (Those over 65 have made some gains, as we reported in our study.) So one can assume that Lee would have had no problem with Santorum's statement if he had just inserted "working age" right before the word "Americans". Or perhaps if he had just added "ages 16 to 65" right after "Americans". Read more...

A recent poll that found wide opposition to Obama's lawless amnesty decrees and support for defunding efforts also asked a third question: "Would you support or oppose Congress passing new legislation that strengthen the rules making it illegal for businesses in the U.S. to hire illegal immigrants?" Support for this was overwhelming, 71–21, far greater than the other questions (strongly support/oppose was 45 percent to 9 percent). The crosstabs show that every demographic group, without exception, supported making it harder to hire illegal aliens — liberal and conservative; Republican and Democrat; black, white, and Hispanic; Protestant, Catholic, and Jew; rich and poor; blue-collar and white-collar; urban and rural; old and young — everybody. Read more...

An illegal alien now under arrest for murdering a 21-year-old convenience store clerk in Mesa, Ariz., on January 22, 2015, was previously in ICE custody in 2013 after a drug- and gang-related felony burglary conviction, but was released on bond after just a few days. This incident tragically illustrates the human cost of the Obama administration's "prosecutorial discretion" policies, otherwise known as "catch and release".

ICE says in a statement that it offered the man, Apolinar Altamirano, release on bond pending a deportation hearing (that still has not taken place two years later), because he had "only" the one felony burglary conviction. It seems that not even all felons are considered to be eligible for enforcement, despite ICE's insistence that it is focused like a laser on removing aliens with criminal convictions, with even "non-violent" felons supposedly ranked as a high priority for deportation, and the president's insistence that the focus is on "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids." (Emphasis added.) As my colleague Jon Feere has said, it appears that bloodshed is a prerequisite for immigration enforcement these days. Read more...

Amidst the gloom and doom of the House Republican leadership's refusal to move effectively against the Obama administration's massive amnesty-by-edict program, three positive — if lesser — straws in the Washington wind have become visible recently. Read more...

On January 6, the DHS Office of Inspector General issued a report panning use of unmanned aerial aircraft ("drones" in the vernacular). In a press release accompanying the report ("CBP Drones are Dubious Achievers") the OIG states, "After spending eight years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has yet to prove the value of its Unmanned Aircraft System (drone) program while drastically understating the costs." Then, to put a fine point on the findings of his office, DHS Inspector General John Roth appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" television show shortly after the report's issuance. Roth said that CBP has already spent $360 million on the drone program over the past eight years, breaking down to about $12,000 per hour — and yet has proven ineffectual for the 150 miles of border being surveilled with the aircraft. Read more...

How should America handle radical alien Islamists of a jihadi mindset without having to wait until they commit acts of violence, whether as part of a terror cell or as lone jackals? (I refuse to defame wolves.) This question looms large after events in Europe over the past few weeks.

At least a part of the answer for non-citizen extremists lies in an unwavering willingness to use, in creative ways, the immigration laws that already exist to expel them. Four provisions come immediately to mind: the exclusion prohibitions against membership in designated terrorist organizations and membership in totalitarian organizations; the deportation provision holding that an alien excludable at entry (for the reasons just stated) is also deportable; and the deportation provision prohibiting "any activity a purpose of which is the opposition to, or the control or overthrow of, the Government of the United States by force, violence, or other unlawful means." Read more...

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security committee rubber-stamped Rep. Michael McCaul's flawed border security bill (HR399) without meaningful improvements. The barely-tweaked bill reportedly is scheduled to be considered by the full House next Wednesday, January 28. Read more...

Congress is about to pass a high-tech foreign worker bill that will — oddly — in its first year, admit something like 430,000 additional temporary workers, about 84 percent of whom will not have high-tech credentials.

That's right — the vast majority of these new nonimmigrant workers will not be admitted because of their technical skills. Read more...

On December 15, Boston University law professor Laila Hlass penned an opinion piece in the Boston Globe titled "Five GOP immigration myths", and unfortunately spread many myths of her own. The immigration issue is undoubtedly complex, but a more accurate picture of President Obama's immigration agenda is important if we are to move toward a better immigration policy. Read more...

The world is an unsettled place, and if the spate of terrorist attacks and raids in past months — in Europe most recently, and the United States, Canada, and Australia before that — are any indicator, it's getting worse. Read more...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report last week on the fiscal effects of immigration. Perhaps because it offers a theoretical discussion rather than new numbers, the report has been mostly overlooked in the media. That's a shame, as this report deserves to be read in conjunction with every numerical analysis of immigration policy that the CBO produces. The report emphasizes the uncertainties associated with fiscal estimates and it should help cast doubt on the CBO's famously positive top-line estimate of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill from two summers ago. Read more...

President Obama's executive amnesty for illegal aliens has put employers in a bind since, unlike the Senate-passed comprehensive immigration bill, it does not explicitly grant employers of illegal aliens amnesty. Employers are, therefore, being advised to exercise extreme caution in helping their illegal alien employees apply for legal status until the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses its guidance and rule-making processes to grant them amnesty from knowingly hiring illegal aliens. Thus, in addition to ongoing legislative and judicial initiatives to stop the executive amnesty, efforts should be made to prevent DHS from extending the amnesty to employers of illegal aliens. Read more...

To the uninitiated, it's hard to tell a real diamond from some of the new synthetic stones: the best of the fakes can even scratch glass as a real diamond would and both shine with rainbow brilliance from all of their facets.

On Wednesday, January 21, the House Homeland Security Committee will take up H.R.399, the Secure Our Border First Act of 2015, introduced by the committee's chairman, Michael McCaul (R-Texas). While this bill is an improvement over the border security bill approved by this committee in the previous Congress and, if implemented, would greatly improve our understanding of what actually goes on at the border and ports of entry, it falls far short of what is needed to slow the flow of illegal immigration and prevent the entry of terrorists and criminals. It proposes to spend $10 billion of taxpayer money without ensuring that a single illegal alien will be sent home. Read more...

Four high school students from a troubled neighborhood in West Phoenix who won a 2004 robotics competition are the subject of an inspirational new movie titled "Spare Parts", and a recent book by the same title. They triumphed because of their intelligence, skill, and resourcefulness. What adds dramatic poignancy and political heft to their story is that three of the four were in the U.S. illegally, having been brought here years earlier from Mexico by their parents. Read more...

Its sounds implausible, but President Obama's Justice Department has won a $48.8 million court settlement against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania because that state was paying welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

It was in one of those press releases sent out on a Friday afternoon leading up to a three-day holiday with the Department's Civil Division making the announcement on Friday, January 16.

Thematically, it seems out of place (which perhaps explains the timing of the announcement), with the administration otherwise going all out to extend a wide variety of benefits to illegal aliens even though Congress has not given it the authority to do so. Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.